We at Action Grandma have a mission: making stupid comics.

Mega City’s East Senior Living Community is a broken, defeated place. Elderly gangsters control everyone’s medicine. Monstrous caretakers prey upon the residents. The shame of their defeat at last year’s county bake-off weighs above them like a concrete sky.

But one day, Action Grandma moves in…

Writers (usually) can’t draw well, but they can tell a story well. Artists (most times) have trouble crafting their stories. Our mission is to make stupid comics, so why not work together to create comics?

Use the short scripts you will find on this site to create comics. The scripts are intentionally structured to be used for 12-panel comics strips for the sake of efficiency.

If you’d like to submit a script of your own, please share a ~500 word story that has a clear beginning, middle, and end.

For more submission details, please head over to our submissions page.

Now, all that being said, let’s talk about “plot-first scripts,” which this book details.

[The plot first script] was devised in the early sixties by Marvel Comics’ founder, guru, guiding light, and eternal inspiration, Stan Lee, who taught all of us who have come after him a lot, including his way of putting a story down on paper. When Stan was creating Marvel, he was writing the entire line of magazines virtually alone — about fourteen super hero titles, some westerns, some humor books, and occasional odd projects that don’t categorize easily. He was also editing all of the above, writing ad copy, supervising a staff, doing radio interviews, assembling letters pages, conferring with artists, and attending publishing meetings. (I don’t know if he was sleeping. Maybe not.) He simply didn’t have time to write full scripts.

So, instead, he gave his pencillers a plot — a few paragraphs outlining the basics of the story. The artist took this outline to his drawing board and drew the 125 or so panels that told the story visually. Those pencil drawings were returned to Stan, who then wrote the captions and dialogue and drew the balloons, captions, and sound effects onto the artwork in a blue line that doesn’t photograph. The artwork was next sent a letterer, and then to the inker, and, finally, to the colorist. Working like this, Stan could do several different issues of different titles virtually simultaneously and thus maintain his Herculean schedule.

In other words, if you can take the 12 or so beats of the stories here and create 125 panels or so of art, please feel free to send it to us.

Here it is broken out (if that helps):

Panels 1–3 (or Panels 1–30) — Act 1: Set-up

Panels 4–6 (or Panels 31–60) — Act 2a: Complications

Panels 7–9 (or Panels 61–90) — Act 2b: Confrontation

Panels 9–12 (or Panels 91–120) — Act 3: Resolutions

So please, use the scripts to create art. Share them with us. Share your own scripts if you’d like. We can collaborate and post them here.

Balanced Living Magazine

Most people strive to have balanced lives, but it is easier said than done. The majority of our daily lives consist of us waking up and going to work, and getting home after dark. However, if you have children, your daily routine might consist of waking them up in the morning, feeding them breakfast, and struggling to get them to school on time.